ACTIONBUTTONNET
2007
text by tim rogers
★★★★
“SO MUCH BETTER THAN GUITAR HERO.”
Yes. Yesss. YESSSSSSS. Stunmant: Ignition is the underrated hero of 2007, a videogame so big, so generous, so complicated, so simple, so gorgeous, and so ridiculous that those who truly “get” it have every right to disown their blood relations if said blood relations would rather play Guitar Hero.
Essentially, Stuntman: Ignition is a videogame about being a stuntman, though not the type of stuntman who jumps off buildings. You’re the type of stuntman who drives a car. I suppose they could have called the game “Stunt Driver“, though seeing as the series was originally created by the makers of the game series Driver, that might have looked kind of tacky. Especially in this day and age, where marketing geniuses would have us believe that if you put two games side-by-side and both of them feature the same word in the title, the consumer would, without a doubt, buy the one with more words in the title. (They must have also done this same test with one-colon titles versus two-colon titles.)
The original Driver game had a couple of tutorial missions, during which you proved to your employers that you knew how to handle a car. Though most of these moves were useful, you didn’t really have to use all of them in the course of the game. The idea for Stuntman was instantly born in hundreds of thousands of gamers’ heads when they played those training missions in Driver, and then solidified the first time they saw themselves do something awesome in mid-mission. Why not make a game that forces us to do these stunts, over and over, a game that forces us to drive awesomely? The same idea had no doubt been born in the heads of the game designers of Driver as well, though seeing as those people changed the original concept of Driver so that your main character was an undercover cop instead of an actual criminal so as to avoid controversy, and then went on to make the psychotically violent Driv3r, which still remains the worst title anything’s ever had, I wouldn’t give them too much credit.
The Driver series spun out of control after the first installment; the producers got hopped-up on me-too-ism, and began to aspire to something of a Grand Theft Auto clone with slightly heavier cars. The original Stuntman game was a splinter project, a gleefully sadistic exploration into how heavy, exactly, they could make those cars. They made them pretty heavy. The challenges were also laid out in kind of sinisterly boring stages. Furthermore, the difficulty was punishing, and one mistake in the very beginning would most likely ruin your chances of getting any further into the mission.
I’m just basing all of these comments on reviews on the internet which I looked up in the last five minutes; I never played the original Stuntman more than a half an hour because it really just didn’t do anything for me.
The reason the original Stuntman didn’t do anything for me is because it was too unbelievable. I mean, just everything about it was unbelievable. You had to race through these crazy stunt sequences for . . . what, exactly? You were a movie stunt driver, only the stages were so sparsely populated that you probably wouldn’t even watch this movie if you found a VHS tape of it in your mailbox on the day of its theatrical release. The idea of playing a game in which you played the part of a stunt double for an actor in a movie felt too sneeringly abstract, like just off-camera, the whole time, was a guy who had actually found proof of the nonexistence of God in a box of Corn Pops. Add to this the leering disbelief cultivated by the game’s nonchalant insistence that movie stunt-driving sequences are shot in three minutes, in real time, and not by literally a hundred takes of three-second bursts, and you end up with what we call an impossible videogame to call the best videogame of all time.
The new Stuntman, with a subtitle they call Ignition, in addition to being a much better game than its predecessor, is also a phenomenal game. It plays great — heavy cars and all — and looks so great, with so much happening all around you as you drive through burning houses and under falling lava boulders and ramp out of parking garages, that you can forgive it for insisting that movie stunt sequences are shot in real-time. Imagine that: a videogame paying homage to movies, and you can respect it all the more precisely because it’s a videogame.
It helps that the makers of this game, Paradigm Entertainment, were once called Paradigm Simulations, and dealt extensively with trying to transform real things into realistically controllable representations on television screens. Their first and most famous attempt at making a videogame was also a sequel to something made by an established developer — it was Pilotwings 64, released alongside Super Mario 64 and the Nintendo 64 console. Way back then, way back in Pilotwings 64 was Stuntman Ignition in its most embryonic form. Back then, the simulation bits and the videogamey bits clung to one another as though in a freezing breeze. It was ultimately too simmy, because when worse comes to worst, realism tends to always convince people, somehow; now here’s Stuntman Ignition, wherein realism and videogames walk hand-in-hand through a county fair on a summer night, and videogames have finally succeeded in ramming a large scepter of cotton-candy down realism’s throat. The result is fantastic, spectacular, commendable. The very least you can say about Stuntman Ignition is that, in this world where people who understand quality do exist, whether Stuntman Ignition sold well or not doesn’t matter, because the people who scripted the events in this game will never — never — find themselves out of work, and should never expect to earn less than $70K a year. If, truly, games are to move forward and heck Hollywood in the back of the head with a basketball pump, these master Rube-Goldberg device craftsmen are the people who will, at last, make it all convincing.
I bet you’re wondering by now, what makes this game so good? Here’s where I finally tell you: everything! (That’s where my “template for review of great game” ends.) Just as in Stuntman (described somewhere up there), you’re a stunt driver in movies. There are six “movies” in the game — a James Bond-like spy movie, a police comedy, a volcano disaster flick, a British gangster film, a military B-movie, a 70s cop thriller, and a superhero blockbuster. (See all the synonyms for “movie” up there? We call that journalism school.) Each “movie” has six “scenes” for you to play out. The director and stunt coordinator describe the scenes for you using such pointed words as “In this scene, you’ll be driving a motorcycle while on fire”. And then, essentially, that’s what you do: you drive that motorcycle while it’s on fire.
The game that ensues is like Burnout 3 meets Parappa the Rapper. You’re going to slam people and crash through buildings, though you’re going to do it according to a strict schedule. Never before have big green flashing arrows indicating which direction to turn made so much sense in a driving game: in other driving games, you’re pretending to be racing a real race; in Stuntman: Ignition, you’re a person (possibly a jerkoff) with a videogame controller, pretending to be a person who’s pretending to be an actor who’s pretending to escape from an exploding city. That is, officially, enough layers of abstraction to initiate the brain’s “heck it, let’s just have fun” reflex.
When a “race” is over, you’re going to see a replay, and magically, all of the green arrows and gadgets will have disappeared. It’s just you, the car, the pumping (cheesy) music score, hundreds of carefully scripted events, and lots of graphics. If it looks cool though not cool enough, you might want to play it again. Unlike other perfectionism-inducing games (like Guitar Hero), you’re allowed some improvisation; the only way you can get actually penalized is to miss one of the landmark tricks that the director has decided ahead of time. What you do is you play these little three-minute segments over and over again, learning all the points you have to hit; then you race them over and over again all over again trying to perfect the hit points and scope out all of the “air pockets” for improvisation.
Stuntman: Ignition proceeds to actually reward you for your adventurous spirit, both by giving you more points (YESSSSSS) and by, well, making your replay look a lot cooler. You don’t even need points, though: when you’re playing this game well, you know. That thrusts it right up there with Metal Gear Solid 3, in my book.
According to Metacritic, this game is somewhat below-average because most reviewers find it “difficult” and “repetitive”. These are words that game reviewers probably shouldn’t be allowed to use. Some reviewers say that the game is only entertaining to people who obsessively pursue perfection, which I guess might be right, though I wouldn’t call myself obsessive about perfection, and I still love this game. I love the repetition of it. Shouldn’t a good game make you want to play it over and over and over again? (Ignore what I said in my Portal review!) It’s actually kind of a shame that websites like IGN groaned at this game; THQ’s PR should have got the word out that the game was made by the makers of Pilotwings 64 — all morbidly obese people on the internet seem to jump at the opportunity to glow all over anything touched by anything by anyone who’s ever been “first-party” with Nintendo. (Denis Dyack, et cetera.)
Okay, what I really mean is that this game is better than Guitar Hero. I’m not even going to say anything about how Guitar Hero isn’t as good as playing a real guitar, because I realize that’s an uppity thing to say. Instead, I’m going to say that Stuntman: Ignition is better, because it represents a greater realm of possibilities attainable by reaching for perfection. Guitar Hero, as what it is, does not simulate a musical performance so much as it puts numbers on it. If you make a mistake in Guitar Hero, you start over. Start over with what, though? You start over pretending to play a song. And when it’s over, what do you get? A number, a tiny bit of rhythm training, and a friend calling you an asshole. With Stuntman: Ignition, your quest for perfection is represented by a replay of your performance. A “replay” of your “performance” with Guitar Hero would just consist of a song that you’ve heard before. In other words, it’s about context. The context of Stuntman is that you’re driving a car for a movie; the context of Guitar Hero is that you’re playing a guitar in a concert. Contextually, playing a guitar is a harder fantasy for someone who’s only pretending to play a guitar by holding a plastic fake guitar; however, driving a pretend car is an easy fantasy for someone who’s pretending to drive a car using an abstract videogame controller. If that doesn’t make perfect sense, put it this way: in Guitar Hero, the “guitar” on the screen is just a big flowing abstract bar; in Stuntman, the car on the screen looks like a car. That sort of thing goes a long way!
click for super-hi-res desktop wallpaper version
On a more molecular level, this game is excellent because of what it does for the art of performance playing. Never before has the performance of a videogame actually looked so . . . real. For years, the art of “superplaying” or “speedrunning” a game has inspired many young people who could be applying that energy into studying to be a doctor to make videos of themselves breaking videogames brutally and carefully. Any speed run of Super Metroid available on YouTube is about as entertaining to watch as a film in which a kid in toothpaste-stained purple sweatpants and “Eraserhead” hair cartwheels into a room, does a pee-pee dance in front of a man delivering a Shakespearean monologue, withdraws a .45 from his waistband, shoots the man in the throat before he can finish speaking, and cartwheels into the next room, where a different man attempting the same monologue waits. Any super play of a hardcore 2D shooting game like Mushihimesama will look like complete utter clusterhecking nonsense to anyone who doesn’t actually like these games. So the guy never lets go of the fire button, and knows exactly where the holes are in this boss’s same-every-time pattern, and is very skilled at staying as close to the bottom of the screen and moving as little as possible while mathematical chaos breaks out around him. So what? In short, super plays and speed runs are ways of playing videogames well, which seems to kind of (maybe) be something that game designers don’t entirely think about when designing games.
It’s actually kind of a glaring problem: why does no one think, “Will our game look more or less like a glue-sniffing ostrich on hot sand when someone plays it as well as they can?” With Stuntman: Ignition, the only way to play is to superplay; the only way to superplay is to play brilliantly. When you’ve done good, you know. When you do awesome and then lose right at the very end — that’s what we call bowing down before the boss. The game is packed with a crude, pure justice. Get a couple of friends over, and pass the controller.
As with all videogames involving automobiles, this one is perhaps better on the Xbox 360, because you can use custom soundtracks so that you’re always driving to Nirvana’s “Breed”. Then again, Motorstorm for the PS3 actually has the song “Breed” in it, though it’s mostly surrounded by blaring filth, so who knows.
Oh well, here’s hoping that in an attempt to appeal to dull critics they don’t make Stuntman 3 a game in which you use the Guitar Hero controller to simulate mouse clicks as your on-screen hand-avatar scripts exploding traffic events in the Unreal Engine for a game about making a pretend race track for a pretend car being driven in real-time by a guy pretending to be an actor who’s pretending to be someone else.
★★★★
“SO MUCH BETTER THAN GUITAR HERO.”
Yes. Yesss. YESSSSSSS. Stunmant: Ignition is the underrated hero of 2007, a videogame so big, so generous, so complicated, so simple, so gorgeous, and so ridiculous that those who truly “get” it have every right to disown their blood relations if said blood relations would rather play Guitar Hero.
Essentially, Stuntman: Ignition is a videogame about being a stuntman, though not the type of stuntman who jumps off buildings. You’re the type of stuntman who drives a car. I suppose they could have called the game “Stunt Driver“, though seeing as the series was originally created by the makers of the game series Driver, that might have looked kind of tacky. Especially in this day and age, where marketing geniuses would have us believe that if you put two games side-by-side and both of them feature the same word in the title, the consumer would, without a doubt, buy the one with more words in the title. (They must have also done this same test with one-colon titles versus two-colon titles.)
The original Driver game had a couple of tutorial missions, during which you proved to your employers that you knew how to handle a car. Though most of these moves were useful, you didn’t really have to use all of them in the course of the game. The idea for Stuntman was instantly born in hundreds of thousands of gamers’ heads when they played those training missions in Driver, and then solidified the first time they saw themselves do something awesome in mid-mission. Why not make a game that forces us to do these stunts, over and over, a game that forces us to drive awesomely? The same idea had no doubt been born in the heads of the game designers of Driver as well, though seeing as those people changed the original concept of Driver so that your main character was an undercover cop instead of an actual criminal so as to avoid controversy, and then went on to make the psychotically violent Driv3r, which still remains the worst title anything’s ever had, I wouldn’t give them too much credit.
The Driver series spun out of control after the first installment; the producers got hopped-up on me-too-ism, and began to aspire to something of a Grand Theft Auto clone with slightly heavier cars. The original Stuntman game was a splinter project, a gleefully sadistic exploration into how heavy, exactly, they could make those cars. They made them pretty heavy. The challenges were also laid out in kind of sinisterly boring stages. Furthermore, the difficulty was punishing, and one mistake in the very beginning would most likely ruin your chances of getting any further into the mission.
I’m just basing all of these comments on reviews on the internet which I looked up in the last five minutes; I never played the original Stuntman more than a half an hour because it really just didn’t do anything for me.
The reason the original Stuntman didn’t do anything for me is because it was too unbelievable. I mean, just everything about it was unbelievable. You had to race through these crazy stunt sequences for . . . what, exactly? You were a movie stunt driver, only the stages were so sparsely populated that you probably wouldn’t even watch this movie if you found a VHS tape of it in your mailbox on the day of its theatrical release. The idea of playing a game in which you played the part of a stunt double for an actor in a movie felt too sneeringly abstract, like just off-camera, the whole time, was a guy who had actually found proof of the nonexistence of God in a box of Corn Pops. Add to this the leering disbelief cultivated by the game’s nonchalant insistence that movie stunt-driving sequences are shot in three minutes, in real time, and not by literally a hundred takes of three-second bursts, and you end up with what we call an impossible videogame to call the best videogame of all time.
The new Stuntman, with a subtitle they call Ignition, in addition to being a much better game than its predecessor, is also a phenomenal game. It plays great — heavy cars and all — and looks so great, with so much happening all around you as you drive through burning houses and under falling lava boulders and ramp out of parking garages, that you can forgive it for insisting that movie stunt sequences are shot in real-time. Imagine that: a videogame paying homage to movies, and you can respect it all the more precisely because it’s a videogame.
It helps that the makers of this game, Paradigm Entertainment, were once called Paradigm Simulations, and dealt extensively with trying to transform real things into realistically controllable representations on television screens. Their first and most famous attempt at making a videogame was also a sequel to something made by an established developer — it was Pilotwings 64, released alongside Super Mario 64 and the Nintendo 64 console. Way back then, way back in Pilotwings 64 was Stuntman Ignition in its most embryonic form. Back then, the simulation bits and the videogamey bits clung to one another as though in a freezing breeze. It was ultimately too simmy, because when worse comes to worst, realism tends to always convince people, somehow; now here’s Stuntman Ignition, wherein realism and videogames walk hand-in-hand through a county fair on a summer night, and videogames have finally succeeded in ramming a large scepter of cotton-candy down realism’s throat. The result is fantastic, spectacular, commendable. The very least you can say about Stuntman Ignition is that, in this world where people who understand quality do exist, whether Stuntman Ignition sold well or not doesn’t matter, because the people who scripted the events in this game will never — never — find themselves out of work, and should never expect to earn less than $70K a year. If, truly, games are to move forward and heck Hollywood in the back of the head with a basketball pump, these master Rube-Goldberg device craftsmen are the people who will, at last, make it all convincing.
I bet you’re wondering by now, what makes this game so good? Here’s where I finally tell you: everything! (That’s where my “template for review of great game” ends.) Just as in Stuntman (described somewhere up there), you’re a stunt driver in movies. There are six “movies” in the game — a James Bond-like spy movie, a police comedy, a volcano disaster flick, a British gangster film, a military B-movie, a 70s cop thriller, and a superhero blockbuster. (See all the synonyms for “movie” up there? We call that journalism school.) Each “movie” has six “scenes” for you to play out. The director and stunt coordinator describe the scenes for you using such pointed words as “In this scene, you’ll be driving a motorcycle while on fire”. And then, essentially, that’s what you do: you drive that motorcycle while it’s on fire.
The game that ensues is like Burnout 3 meets Parappa the Rapper. You’re going to slam people and crash through buildings, though you’re going to do it according to a strict schedule. Never before have big green flashing arrows indicating which direction to turn made so much sense in a driving game: in other driving games, you’re pretending to be racing a real race; in Stuntman: Ignition, you’re a person (possibly a jerkoff) with a videogame controller, pretending to be a person who’s pretending to be an actor who’s pretending to escape from an exploding city. That is, officially, enough layers of abstraction to initiate the brain’s “heck it, let’s just have fun” reflex.
When a “race” is over, you’re going to see a replay, and magically, all of the green arrows and gadgets will have disappeared. It’s just you, the car, the pumping (cheesy) music score, hundreds of carefully scripted events, and lots of graphics. If it looks cool though not cool enough, you might want to play it again. Unlike other perfectionism-inducing games (like Guitar Hero), you’re allowed some improvisation; the only way you can get actually penalized is to miss one of the landmark tricks that the director has decided ahead of time. What you do is you play these little three-minute segments over and over again, learning all the points you have to hit; then you race them over and over again all over again trying to perfect the hit points and scope out all of the “air pockets” for improvisation.
Stuntman: Ignition proceeds to actually reward you for your adventurous spirit, both by giving you more points (YESSSSSS) and by, well, making your replay look a lot cooler. You don’t even need points, though: when you’re playing this game well, you know. That thrusts it right up there with Metal Gear Solid 3, in my book.
According to Metacritic, this game is somewhat below-average because most reviewers find it “difficult” and “repetitive”. These are words that game reviewers probably shouldn’t be allowed to use. Some reviewers say that the game is only entertaining to people who obsessively pursue perfection, which I guess might be right, though I wouldn’t call myself obsessive about perfection, and I still love this game. I love the repetition of it. Shouldn’t a good game make you want to play it over and over and over again? (Ignore what I said in my Portal review!) It’s actually kind of a shame that websites like IGN groaned at this game; THQ’s PR should have got the word out that the game was made by the makers of Pilotwings 64 — all morbidly obese people on the internet seem to jump at the opportunity to glow all over anything touched by anything by anyone who’s ever been “first-party” with Nintendo. (Denis Dyack, et cetera.)
Okay, what I really mean is that this game is better than Guitar Hero. I’m not even going to say anything about how Guitar Hero isn’t as good as playing a real guitar, because I realize that’s an uppity thing to say. Instead, I’m going to say that Stuntman: Ignition is better, because it represents a greater realm of possibilities attainable by reaching for perfection. Guitar Hero, as what it is, does not simulate a musical performance so much as it puts numbers on it. If you make a mistake in Guitar Hero, you start over. Start over with what, though? You start over pretending to play a song. And when it’s over, what do you get? A number, a tiny bit of rhythm training, and a friend calling you an asshole. With Stuntman: Ignition, your quest for perfection is represented by a replay of your performance. A “replay” of your “performance” with Guitar Hero would just consist of a song that you’ve heard before. In other words, it’s about context. The context of Stuntman is that you’re driving a car for a movie; the context of Guitar Hero is that you’re playing a guitar in a concert. Contextually, playing a guitar is a harder fantasy for someone who’s only pretending to play a guitar by holding a plastic fake guitar; however, driving a pretend car is an easy fantasy for someone who’s pretending to drive a car using an abstract videogame controller. If that doesn’t make perfect sense, put it this way: in Guitar Hero, the “guitar” on the screen is just a big flowing abstract bar; in Stuntman, the car on the screen looks like a car. That sort of thing goes a long way!
click for super-hi-res desktop wallpaper version
On a more molecular level, this game is excellent because of what it does for the art of performance playing. Never before has the performance of a videogame actually looked so . . . real. For years, the art of “superplaying” or “speedrunning” a game has inspired many young people who could be applying that energy into studying to be a doctor to make videos of themselves breaking videogames brutally and carefully. Any speed run of Super Metroid available on YouTube is about as entertaining to watch as a film in which a kid in toothpaste-stained purple sweatpants and “Eraserhead” hair cartwheels into a room, does a pee-pee dance in front of a man delivering a Shakespearean monologue, withdraws a .45 from his waistband, shoots the man in the throat before he can finish speaking, and cartwheels into the next room, where a different man attempting the same monologue waits. Any super play of a hardcore 2D shooting game like Mushihimesama will look like complete utter clusterhecking nonsense to anyone who doesn’t actually like these games. So the guy never lets go of the fire button, and knows exactly where the holes are in this boss’s same-every-time pattern, and is very skilled at staying as close to the bottom of the screen and moving as little as possible while mathematical chaos breaks out around him. So what? In short, super plays and speed runs are ways of playing videogames well, which seems to kind of (maybe) be something that game designers don’t entirely think about when designing games.
It’s actually kind of a glaring problem: why does no one think, “Will our game look more or less like a glue-sniffing ostrich on hot sand when someone plays it as well as they can?” With Stuntman: Ignition, the only way to play is to superplay; the only way to superplay is to play brilliantly. When you’ve done good, you know. When you do awesome and then lose right at the very end — that’s what we call bowing down before the boss. The game is packed with a crude, pure justice. Get a couple of friends over, and pass the controller.
As with all videogames involving automobiles, this one is perhaps better on the Xbox 360, because you can use custom soundtracks so that you’re always driving to Nirvana’s “Breed”. Then again, Motorstorm for the PS3 actually has the song “Breed” in it, though it’s mostly surrounded by blaring filth, so who knows.
Oh well, here’s hoping that in an attempt to appeal to dull critics they don’t make Stuntman 3 a game in which you use the Guitar Hero controller to simulate mouse clicks as your on-screen hand-avatar scripts exploding traffic events in the Unreal Engine for a game about making a pretend race track for a pretend car being driven in real-time by a guy pretending to be an actor who’s pretending to be someone else.
2006
text by Brendan Lee
★☆☆☆
“THE NINTH ONE OF THESE.”
. . . or, perhaps much more appropriately, Mavis Beacon Teaches Nothing.
There is a certain fun-ness about hitting things!
And that is pretty much the rhythm genre it its entire moldering nutshell. I used to think – – god, I used to think – – that the rhythm genre was more or less slouching towards some sort of apex; I figured that there would be a time not too far away where people would shuffle up to some sort of Great Machine, slot a couple of coins, and start slouching their way up Rockstar Mountain, one flashing jittery headrush at a time.
I mean, how could they not? I seen kids up there in Utsunomiya, up there in the Tochigi-ken, where I’ve got to admit there isn’t a whole hecking lot to do, but whatever there is to do they take it pretty damn serious, whether it’s drinking straight vodka until they vomit 3/4 of the way up their esophagus or practicing bubble-era Para Para moves in front of any and all available reflective surfaces. I seen a guy play Drummania like he had a book report due on Treasure Island in 7 minutes and his mother was on fire. That’s gotta be a transferable skill, huh? I mean, huh? You can’t seriously have your own sticks that you wrapped with your own grip tape, have the gloves and everything, and the bravado and the girl on the side clapping and jumping up and down with the pigtails and bubblegum and the mouthing the words to the song as you pound away. I mean, can you? Huh? At some point, you’re going to go into the studio, and you’re going to take everything you learned and ball it into a mental burst of white-hot static, and Atomic Love is going to shoot out of your hands, and you and your best rebellious mates will be off on their way to chauffeured limousines and maid-shaped swimming pools, right?
The thing is, right now I’m pretty sure no, uh-uh . . . No. Not. Ever. I’ve seen these games pretend to be pretty much everything to all people – – and thusly, people pretending to be pretty much everything to all these games . . . people pretending to rap, or dance, or hallucinate some kind of plasticky balls-in-hand jamfest to Huey Lewis (and the News!)’s Power of Love. I’ve seen them pretend to stroke the shamisen and rustle the maracas like a juicing epileptic with nervous polio. I’ve seen them pump their fists in the air and finish off a perfect behind-the-back leper jam on Magic Music Magic. I’ve seen them pretend to DJ in a way that would make a real DJ start reading The Watchtower and shop for slacks at the Farm and Fleet.
Those people will never do those things in real life (if they didn’t already do them before), because picking up and playing an instrument will never give the same kind of dime-bag-o’-meth-behind-the-Pick-‘n’-Save-style kicks that pre-recorded crowds can give you. That young rebel-without-a-clue picking out Smoke on the Water in his rented apartment over a struggling bowling alley can squint out his dirty cracked window and see the crowds, feel the crowds, blow an invisible kiss to the front row HOney in the ragged Slayer tank top . . . or he can pick up Elite Beat Agents and be a superstar right hecking now.
The ninth one of these, Namco.
Number nine.
They’re all synchronized with all of Namco’s other properties, too, don’t worry, so you’ve got your Idolm@ster in there . . . and whoever else Namco’s got their tongue into. You got your Mario Brothers in there, you got your Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. And when you make it, you can stand out in front of S@y in Akihabara with Two Drums Guy, drawing chuckles from dimpled conflagrations of gently sagging real estate conferencers from Brisbane, laughing and smiling and pointing at someone who has put an awful hecking lot of yen into becoming the best that there is at one of the most purely cynical forms of entertainment in existence.
Someday, I hope, long after Jesus Christ has returned in his Golden Impreza and the righteous have called shotgun, they’ll find one of these things ditched in some prehistoric landfill, and they’ll soak off the corrosion and re-rubberize the drum heads and synthesize some wooden-analogue sticks and jimmy the coin slot and have themselves a go at this. And I think I can say with some degree of certainty that they will shake their heads, and wonder (with a cybernetic archeologist’s encyclopedic knowledge of ancient pop culture):
These people really wanted to be good at something, I guess. And when they couldn’t be – – when they couldn’t muster up enough juice to actually put on their hecking sandals and shuffle over to somebody with talent and patience . . . well, I guess they found a machine to go ahead and tell them that everything would be okay, that they were good enough as they were, and that they deserved a cheering crowd as much as Steve Vai or Menudo.
Then they will go off and have some fantastic nachos, which will be free in the future, come in easy-to-apply patch form, and require the death of an unborn Micronesian infant who never learned how to dream.
★☆☆☆
“THE NINTH ONE OF THESE.”
. . . or, perhaps much more appropriately, Mavis Beacon Teaches Nothing.
There is a certain fun-ness about hitting things!
And that is pretty much the rhythm genre it its entire moldering nutshell. I used to think – – god, I used to think – – that the rhythm genre was more or less slouching towards some sort of apex; I figured that there would be a time not too far away where people would shuffle up to some sort of Great Machine, slot a couple of coins, and start slouching their way up Rockstar Mountain, one flashing jittery headrush at a time.
I mean, how could they not? I seen kids up there in Utsunomiya, up there in the Tochigi-ken, where I’ve got to admit there isn’t a whole hecking lot to do, but whatever there is to do they take it pretty damn serious, whether it’s drinking straight vodka until they vomit 3/4 of the way up their esophagus or practicing bubble-era Para Para moves in front of any and all available reflective surfaces. I seen a guy play Drummania like he had a book report due on Treasure Island in 7 minutes and his mother was on fire. That’s gotta be a transferable skill, huh? I mean, huh? You can’t seriously have your own sticks that you wrapped with your own grip tape, have the gloves and everything, and the bravado and the girl on the side clapping and jumping up and down with the pigtails and bubblegum and the mouthing the words to the song as you pound away. I mean, can you? Huh? At some point, you’re going to go into the studio, and you’re going to take everything you learned and ball it into a mental burst of white-hot static, and Atomic Love is going to shoot out of your hands, and you and your best rebellious mates will be off on their way to chauffeured limousines and maid-shaped swimming pools, right?
The thing is, right now I’m pretty sure no, uh-uh . . . No. Not. Ever. I’ve seen these games pretend to be pretty much everything to all people – – and thusly, people pretending to be pretty much everything to all these games . . . people pretending to rap, or dance, or hallucinate some kind of plasticky balls-in-hand jamfest to Huey Lewis (and the News!)’s Power of Love. I’ve seen them pretend to stroke the shamisen and rustle the maracas like a juicing epileptic with nervous polio. I’ve seen them pump their fists in the air and finish off a perfect behind-the-back leper jam on Magic Music Magic. I’ve seen them pretend to DJ in a way that would make a real DJ start reading The Watchtower and shop for slacks at the Farm and Fleet.
Those people will never do those things in real life (if they didn’t already do them before), because picking up and playing an instrument will never give the same kind of dime-bag-o’-meth-behind-the-Pick-‘n’-Save-style kicks that pre-recorded crowds can give you. That young rebel-without-a-clue picking out Smoke on the Water in his rented apartment over a struggling bowling alley can squint out his dirty cracked window and see the crowds, feel the crowds, blow an invisible kiss to the front row HOney in the ragged Slayer tank top . . . or he can pick up Elite Beat Agents and be a superstar right hecking now.
The ninth one of these, Namco.
Number nine.
They’re all synchronized with all of Namco’s other properties, too, don’t worry, so you’ve got your Idolm@ster in there . . . and whoever else Namco’s got their tongue into. You got your Mario Brothers in there, you got your Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. And when you make it, you can stand out in front of S@y in Akihabara with Two Drums Guy, drawing chuckles from dimpled conflagrations of gently sagging real estate conferencers from Brisbane, laughing and smiling and pointing at someone who has put an awful hecking lot of yen into becoming the best that there is at one of the most purely cynical forms of entertainment in existence.
Someday, I hope, long after Jesus Christ has returned in his Golden Impreza and the righteous have called shotgun, they’ll find one of these things ditched in some prehistoric landfill, and they’ll soak off the corrosion and re-rubberize the drum heads and synthesize some wooden-analogue sticks and jimmy the coin slot and have themselves a go at this. And I think I can say with some degree of certainty that they will shake their heads, and wonder (with a cybernetic archeologist’s encyclopedic knowledge of ancient pop culture):
These people really wanted to be good at something, I guess. And when they couldn’t be – – when they couldn’t muster up enough juice to actually put on their hecking sandals and shuffle over to somebody with talent and patience . . . well, I guess they found a machine to go ahead and tell them that everything would be okay, that they were good enough as they were, and that they deserved a cheering crowd as much as Steve Vai or Menudo.
Then they will go off and have some fantastic nachos, which will be free in the future, come in easy-to-apply patch form, and require the death of an unborn Micronesian infant who never learned how to dream.
2006
text by tim rogers
★★☆☆
“AT TIMES ADMIRABLE AND CUTE AS SOME WEIRD ENGRISH SPOKEN BY A SHOP-KEEPER IN A BARELY-KNOWN 8-BIT GAME TRANSLATED BY A TEAM OF TWO JAPANESE GIRLS AND FOUR DICTIONARIES.”
There’s a track by Ryuichi Sakamoto in Seiken Densetsu 4 (aka Dawn of Mana) — the back of the box says so — life-long listener though I am, it took me Actual Internet Research to figure out which track that was. This says many things: first of all, that it’s not clear which of the many bouncy cut-scenes that opens the game is the “opening”, because I reckon if you’re going to get Ryuichi Sakamoto to do a track for your conceptually bland action-adventure videogame, you’d probably want to make it the opening. There’s a scene narrated by an old man with a semi-hateful, mouthful-of-gravel voice, there’s a scene where the elemental spirits from the earlier “Mana” games float and bob around and talk to each other in portentous tones and helium voices about the big events that are probably happening soon, and there’s a scene where a boy and a girl frolic in a field. There’s a scene with credits, too, and the credits are in English, and they say “Opening theme by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music by Kenji Ito”. Does that mean that the music that’s playing at that scene is the “opening theme”? Well, some games list the performer / composer of the “ending theme” in the opening credits, don’t they? It’s puzzling, after a while.
The composer of the rest of the music in this game, a Mr. Kenji Ito, has been aspiring the Ryuichi Sakamoto’s virtuoso for years, along with other bright game composers, such as Yasunori Mitsuda. What my ears told me when I first played this game was somewhat profound: Kenji Ito is able to surround a single track by Ryuichi Sakamoto and render it invisible. For years, those in the know have understood that Kenji Ito knows what the hell he’s doing — he’s perhaps the top of the top class of Japanese game composers, able to give background music for a Generic Snow Village in, say, Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song the produced roundness and fullness of a hit pop number. He’s not just a “game music composer” — he’s a musician. Conversely, one could argue that Ryuichi Sakamoto has been making Japanese RPG soundtrack music since before videogames ever existed.
The most interesting thing about Sakamoto’s presence in this game at all is that it represents a rare, shining beam of artistic conscience from Square-Enix, who has recently been content to put Mickey Mouse in a black robe and have him murder monsters with a giant key. For Final Fantasy XII, Square had the kind of sneering arrogance to assume that they could make a star out of whoever they let sing the theme song, hence the selection of limp-voiced big-haired piano-banging she-geek Angela Aki. This was evidence that Square had pride in Final Fantasy XII as a game — either that, or they were over-budget, and wanted to hire someone who wasn’t expensive. For Kingdom Hearts, they’ve been hiring hot young pop-star Hikaru Utada, whose English lyrics make me wish I owned a pistol. Why put a world-class, historically important, undeniably “Japanese” super-man like Ryuichi Sakamoto to work on Seiken Densetsu 4? To draw attention to the game, of course. Seiken Densetsu — or, “The Mana Series” is as dead as it is alive; it’s the purgatory of Japanese RPGs. The second one — released in America as “Secret of Mana“, was awesome because you could play it with two friends. The third-one was paper-thin and beloved. The numerous recent spin-offs (including an obnoxiously thin DS outing) have taken the series apart and given players only a shard of what they might have been able to love in a previous installment.
None of the game itself is as illustrious as the career of Mr. Sakamoto, though the physics engine is quite nice. You play the game as a big-haired boy wearing too many garments. You can fight enemies with a sword, a whip, or a slingshot. There’s a weird net-like feeling of physics drifting down on top of the whole package — you can whap objects with your sword, and if you aim them right, they’ll smack into and kill enemies. There might be a stack of objects — hit it with your sword and watch it jiggle. It’ll never jiggle the same way twice. Grab a rock with the whip and throw it; watch stuff break. Hit something with a slingshot, and it moves. The physics are finely tuned, though in the most bizarre little way. It feels like everything’s totally random, even when it’s most obviously not. Most applause-worthy is the sheer number of physics objects. They’re seriously all over the place — Square had already licensed the Havok Physics Engine, so god damn it, they were going to use it as much as possible.
Part of me wants to sigh and/or groan at this game for being linear and kind of boring. There’s a cut-scene involving cartoon-headed characters that are supposed to evoke nostalgic yiffing, and though I loved Secret of Mana like any other man who was once a boy, I do not yiff; then there’s a title card, and then you’re in a dungeon. Progress through the dungeon, whomping physics objects, knocking over enemies, picking up millions of little colored baubles and being congratulated via quick onscreen messages whenever your maximum hit points or some other statistic raise by some small integer. Eventually you’ll reach a locked door; kill the right enemy to get the key, open the door, continue romping through the dungeon. The dungeon ends with another snore-tastic cut-scene in which characters yip and/or weep, and then there’s another dungeon, which you start with your levels reset to zero. It’s all very linear and kind of boring in the context of real-world joy (candlelit sex, et cetera), though at least it’s honest about itself: it’s a dungeon-blaster. It’s an action videogame. It’s colorful, quick, kinetic, bursty, and poppy. It’s not great, and it doesn’t solve the mystery of nuclear fusion or find my missing guitar pick or anything, though it’s still a nice, cute little game that sometimes has some neat little spikes of challenge.
Many fans were outraged or, at the least, disappointed to hear that this game would be just one-player, and that it would apparently just be a stage-based action-adventure thinking-man’s beat-em-down. Says a “customer preview” on Gamestop.com’s list page for Dawn of Mana: “I for one would rather they stick to the traditional 2D graphics for this one.” Another reader calls the series — up until this bastardizing installment, of course — “near-perfection”. This is kind of a shame. This is evidence that, more dangerous than narcotics or alcohol is our children’s tendency to not understand what they really want. I say, if you want 2D graphics, play the original Secret of Mana again. Or play Children of Mana for DS. With a couple of friends on Wi-Fi, it’s not so terrible, and it has some sparkling Kenji Ito music.
Dawn of Mana is something new, as weird as that is for Square (unless you liked and/or remember Threads of Fate), and it mostly works. It’s the physics engine that nails it in. Though it acts weird sometimes, it rarely stops being fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Square would put such a rock-solid, crunchy core into a game that they were convinced could have been nothing at all and still sold thousands of copies to “devoted series fans”. It’s nice to see the effort, though it’s weird that they give the physics objects a name: they call them “MONO” — in all English letters, like that. (“MONO” is Japanese for “object”.) This is really weird and jarring when the first couple help windows describe how to use the physics objects to your advantage. Why give them a name?
Maybe it was because, since the Final Fantasy titles all became multi-hojillion-sellers, the producers at Square have required all RPGs to have an in-game “system” with an arbitrary name — the “Active Time Battle System” or “Active Dimension Battle System”, for example. If that’s why they called the physics objects “MONO”, then that’s kind of a hilarious little dodge, admirable and cute as some weird Engrish spoken by a shop-keeper in a barely-known 8-bit game translated by a team of two Japanese girls and four dictionaries.
Going back to the Gamestop page — sorry, I have to do this — the first three of four bullet points describing this game are as follows:
“Experience the beloved world of Mana in a fully 3D environment for the first time.
Explore sweeping plains and mountains that stretch as far as the eye can see, brought vividly to life by the detailed visuals that fans have come to expect from the Mana series.
*Experience an interactive world that encourages players to “touch†the world of Mana.“
Aren’t these three all describing the same hecking thing? Why not, I don’t know, encourage the kids who learned to read from online videogame retailers to hunt down (read: bittorrent) some culture by listing that the game “Features a theme song by virtuoso composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the father of new age and electronic music!” or even try to make the game sound fun, by saying that it “Features a new, detailed physics engine for countless battle possibilities”? Or is that what they’re talking about with a weird line about “‘Touch’ the World of Mana”?
So what we have here, ultimately, is a poppy, cute game with terrific music that can be listened to on its own without shame (if you, like me, are the type of person to ever have those Ryuichi Sakamoto Mood days), a drippingly schlocky story about people with too much hair who manage to wear entire wardrobes, set in a series that Square expects people to love because earlier entries in the series were pretty fun for gamers who managed to actually have friends when Nirvana was still the coolest band in the world. Square expected this game to sell by name alone, which was slightly weird behavior, seeing as the previous “World of Mana” game, Children of Mana for DS, didn’t sell at all. A funny story is that Square apparently under-shipped Final Fantasy III for DS because Children of Mana had sold less than half a million copies, proving to them that the DS was just a fad for the “non-gamers”. And then Final Fantasy III sold through half a million. This should have proved to Square that a game will sell if it is good enough to get people talking, though instead, it seems to have proved that games will sell if they have numbers in their titles. As a result, Seiken Densetsu 4 is now available at most Japanese game specialty shops for around $20 new. Which is to say, if the number in the title is what interests you in Seiken Densetsu 4: Dawn of Mana, you’ll probably enjoy it less than people who are just looking to have a good time with pseudo-real object physics.
★★☆☆
“AT TIMES ADMIRABLE AND CUTE AS SOME WEIRD ENGRISH SPOKEN BY A SHOP-KEEPER IN A BARELY-KNOWN 8-BIT GAME TRANSLATED BY A TEAM OF TWO JAPANESE GIRLS AND FOUR DICTIONARIES.”
There’s a track by Ryuichi Sakamoto in Seiken Densetsu 4 (aka Dawn of Mana) — the back of the box says so — life-long listener though I am, it took me Actual Internet Research to figure out which track that was. This says many things: first of all, that it’s not clear which of the many bouncy cut-scenes that opens the game is the “opening”, because I reckon if you’re going to get Ryuichi Sakamoto to do a track for your conceptually bland action-adventure videogame, you’d probably want to make it the opening. There’s a scene narrated by an old man with a semi-hateful, mouthful-of-gravel voice, there’s a scene where the elemental spirits from the earlier “Mana” games float and bob around and talk to each other in portentous tones and helium voices about the big events that are probably happening soon, and there’s a scene where a boy and a girl frolic in a field. There’s a scene with credits, too, and the credits are in English, and they say “Opening theme by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Music by Kenji Ito”. Does that mean that the music that’s playing at that scene is the “opening theme”? Well, some games list the performer / composer of the “ending theme” in the opening credits, don’t they? It’s puzzling, after a while.
The composer of the rest of the music in this game, a Mr. Kenji Ito, has been aspiring the Ryuichi Sakamoto’s virtuoso for years, along with other bright game composers, such as Yasunori Mitsuda. What my ears told me when I first played this game was somewhat profound: Kenji Ito is able to surround a single track by Ryuichi Sakamoto and render it invisible. For years, those in the know have understood that Kenji Ito knows what the hell he’s doing — he’s perhaps the top of the top class of Japanese game composers, able to give background music for a Generic Snow Village in, say, Romancing Saga: Minstrel Song the produced roundness and fullness of a hit pop number. He’s not just a “game music composer” — he’s a musician. Conversely, one could argue that Ryuichi Sakamoto has been making Japanese RPG soundtrack music since before videogames ever existed.
The most interesting thing about Sakamoto’s presence in this game at all is that it represents a rare, shining beam of artistic conscience from Square-Enix, who has recently been content to put Mickey Mouse in a black robe and have him murder monsters with a giant key. For Final Fantasy XII, Square had the kind of sneering arrogance to assume that they could make a star out of whoever they let sing the theme song, hence the selection of limp-voiced big-haired piano-banging she-geek Angela Aki. This was evidence that Square had pride in Final Fantasy XII as a game — either that, or they were over-budget, and wanted to hire someone who wasn’t expensive. For Kingdom Hearts, they’ve been hiring hot young pop-star Hikaru Utada, whose English lyrics make me wish I owned a pistol. Why put a world-class, historically important, undeniably “Japanese” super-man like Ryuichi Sakamoto to work on Seiken Densetsu 4? To draw attention to the game, of course. Seiken Densetsu — or, “The Mana Series” is as dead as it is alive; it’s the purgatory of Japanese RPGs. The second one — released in America as “Secret of Mana“, was awesome because you could play it with two friends. The third-one was paper-thin and beloved. The numerous recent spin-offs (including an obnoxiously thin DS outing) have taken the series apart and given players only a shard of what they might have been able to love in a previous installment.
None of the game itself is as illustrious as the career of Mr. Sakamoto, though the physics engine is quite nice. You play the game as a big-haired boy wearing too many garments. You can fight enemies with a sword, a whip, or a slingshot. There’s a weird net-like feeling of physics drifting down on top of the whole package — you can whap objects with your sword, and if you aim them right, they’ll smack into and kill enemies. There might be a stack of objects — hit it with your sword and watch it jiggle. It’ll never jiggle the same way twice. Grab a rock with the whip and throw it; watch stuff break. Hit something with a slingshot, and it moves. The physics are finely tuned, though in the most bizarre little way. It feels like everything’s totally random, even when it’s most obviously not. Most applause-worthy is the sheer number of physics objects. They’re seriously all over the place — Square had already licensed the Havok Physics Engine, so god damn it, they were going to use it as much as possible.
Part of me wants to sigh and/or groan at this game for being linear and kind of boring. There’s a cut-scene involving cartoon-headed characters that are supposed to evoke nostalgic yiffing, and though I loved Secret of Mana like any other man who was once a boy, I do not yiff; then there’s a title card, and then you’re in a dungeon. Progress through the dungeon, whomping physics objects, knocking over enemies, picking up millions of little colored baubles and being congratulated via quick onscreen messages whenever your maximum hit points or some other statistic raise by some small integer. Eventually you’ll reach a locked door; kill the right enemy to get the key, open the door, continue romping through the dungeon. The dungeon ends with another snore-tastic cut-scene in which characters yip and/or weep, and then there’s another dungeon, which you start with your levels reset to zero. It’s all very linear and kind of boring in the context of real-world joy (candlelit sex, et cetera), though at least it’s honest about itself: it’s a dungeon-blaster. It’s an action videogame. It’s colorful, quick, kinetic, bursty, and poppy. It’s not great, and it doesn’t solve the mystery of nuclear fusion or find my missing guitar pick or anything, though it’s still a nice, cute little game that sometimes has some neat little spikes of challenge.
Many fans were outraged or, at the least, disappointed to hear that this game would be just one-player, and that it would apparently just be a stage-based action-adventure thinking-man’s beat-em-down. Says a “customer preview” on Gamestop.com’s list page for Dawn of Mana: “I for one would rather they stick to the traditional 2D graphics for this one.” Another reader calls the series — up until this bastardizing installment, of course — “near-perfection”. This is kind of a shame. This is evidence that, more dangerous than narcotics or alcohol is our children’s tendency to not understand what they really want. I say, if you want 2D graphics, play the original Secret of Mana again. Or play Children of Mana for DS. With a couple of friends on Wi-Fi, it’s not so terrible, and it has some sparkling Kenji Ito music.
Dawn of Mana is something new, as weird as that is for Square (unless you liked and/or remember Threads of Fate), and it mostly works. It’s the physics engine that nails it in. Though it acts weird sometimes, it rarely stops being fascinating. It’s hard to believe that Square would put such a rock-solid, crunchy core into a game that they were convinced could have been nothing at all and still sold thousands of copies to “devoted series fans”. It’s nice to see the effort, though it’s weird that they give the physics objects a name: they call them “MONO” — in all English letters, like that. (“MONO” is Japanese for “object”.) This is really weird and jarring when the first couple help windows describe how to use the physics objects to your advantage. Why give them a name?
Maybe it was because, since the Final Fantasy titles all became multi-hojillion-sellers, the producers at Square have required all RPGs to have an in-game “system” with an arbitrary name — the “Active Time Battle System” or “Active Dimension Battle System”, for example. If that’s why they called the physics objects “MONO”, then that’s kind of a hilarious little dodge, admirable and cute as some weird Engrish spoken by a shop-keeper in a barely-known 8-bit game translated by a team of two Japanese girls and four dictionaries.
Going back to the Gamestop page — sorry, I have to do this — the first three of four bullet points describing this game are as follows:
“Experience the beloved world of Mana in a fully 3D environment for the first time.
Explore sweeping plains and mountains that stretch as far as the eye can see, brought vividly to life by the detailed visuals that fans have come to expect from the Mana series.
*Experience an interactive world that encourages players to “touch†the world of Mana.“
Aren’t these three all describing the same hecking thing? Why not, I don’t know, encourage the kids who learned to read from online videogame retailers to hunt down (read: bittorrent) some culture by listing that the game “Features a theme song by virtuoso composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, the father of new age and electronic music!” or even try to make the game sound fun, by saying that it “Features a new, detailed physics engine for countless battle possibilities”? Or is that what they’re talking about with a weird line about “‘Touch’ the World of Mana”?
So what we have here, ultimately, is a poppy, cute game with terrific music that can be listened to on its own without shame (if you, like me, are the type of person to ever have those Ryuichi Sakamoto Mood days), a drippingly schlocky story about people with too much hair who manage to wear entire wardrobes, set in a series that Square expects people to love because earlier entries in the series were pretty fun for gamers who managed to actually have friends when Nirvana was still the coolest band in the world. Square expected this game to sell by name alone, which was slightly weird behavior, seeing as the previous “World of Mana” game, Children of Mana for DS, didn’t sell at all. A funny story is that Square apparently under-shipped Final Fantasy III for DS because Children of Mana had sold less than half a million copies, proving to them that the DS was just a fad for the “non-gamers”. And then Final Fantasy III sold through half a million. This should have proved to Square that a game will sell if it is good enough to get people talking, though instead, it seems to have proved that games will sell if they have numbers in their titles. As a result, Seiken Densetsu 4 is now available at most Japanese game specialty shops for around $20 new. Which is to say, if the number in the title is what interests you in Seiken Densetsu 4: Dawn of Mana, you’ll probably enjoy it less than people who are just looking to have a good time with pseudo-real object physics.
2005
text by Thom Moyles
☆☆☆☆
“IS THE MOST WORTHWHILE PIECE OF SOFTWARE THAT YOU COULD PUT IN YOUR DS.”
Electroplankton is definitely my favorite piece of software for the DS, probably one of the best portable pieces of software I own and one of the most pleasing pieces of electronic entertainment that I’ve devoted my time towards. It’s a ballsy experiment that wants to be loved, a joyful piece of work that’s happy without making you want to throw up in your mouth (Mario (since the N64), I’m looking at you). Yet, I’m giving it zero stars (out of four). I’m doing this because Electroplankton isn’t a game. And heck, this is a site for game reviews.
Now, this is a little unfair. After all, I’m not going to follow this up with successive zero-star reviews of kanji dicitionaries or any of the other assorted titles for the DS that are clearly not games. That would be a pretty jerky move and would be like if we suddenly started giving zero-star reviews to motorcycles because hey, those aren’t games either. No, Electroplankton is a pretty unique case, in that while it’s not a game, it’s not clearly something else, since generally those other DS titles have a purpose, like trying to teach you Japanese characters or simulating a guitar. Electroplankton, in comparison, is enough like a game to confuse people. After all, there aren’t any explicit goals, which both eliminates it from being a purposeful piece of software like a kanji dictionary and hilariously enough, also from what we typically think of as a game.
Electroplankton‘s modules are based on the theory of “found music” or musique concrète, which basically boils down to “music can be what you find, rather than what you create”. These modules are set up so that a series of small interactions on the part of the user act as triggers for generating musical sequences. The interactions are simple enough that the user can figure out how to manipulate each module in a short period of time and vague enough that the user is never really composing in the traditional sense. They’re hitting things to see what happens and most of the time, you’ll eventually get something you like. The key to the success of Electroplankton in this area is that the modules are mostly very well-designed, allowing the user to generate a wide variety of pleasing tones without sounding like a 5-year-old smashing their hands on a piano.
A major part of musique concrète is the concept of play, which is why Electroplankton is such a confusing piece of software. The best way to put it seems to be that you don’t play Electroplankton, you play with it. The semantic assumption of the latter is that the act of playing is teleological, or to be less of a dick about it, that there’s an end to the means. The way that we understand how to play a game is to progress. It’s this lack of progression that separates Electroplankton from something like SimCity. Electroplankton is a pure sandbox in the sense that the entirety of the experience is to create something temporary, an aural equivalent of the Zen Sand Tray that’s supposed to help executives relax their balls. These things are commonly referred to as ‘toys’ and that’s a good enough term for what Electroplankton does, with the caveat that the usual reaction to ‘toy’ is to assume a lack of significance, which is indicative of a disturbing lack of imagination.
When Electroplankton was shown to a dementedly grinning E3 audience, it was presented by a DJ with a full set of rack-mounted equipment and accompanied on the big screen with quick cuts of gnarly graphics and effects, all while Reggie Fils-Aime gyrated and gurned on-stage. This was, of course, viciously &^#$#ed. If you’re going to make techno music, get a sampler and a synthesizer. Hell, the way things are going now, you’d probably just need the sampler. Using Electroplankton as part of your compositions would be a gimmick, a chiptune-esque trope that says “the most important thing about my music is not my music”. While the actual presentation was astonishingly dumb, I can’t really blame Nintendo for taking the easy way out. Wheeling out somebody on a bed who’s using a nice set of headphones, who just noodles around for 10 minutes before finding something that they find particularly pleasing and then maybe stretches their head back with their eyes closed, while this is nice, while this is a great example of how Electroplankton is the most worthwhile piece of software that you could put in your DS, this is not exactly something that’s going to set Reggie’s loins on fire. Better have Shiggy come out with a sword and shield then.
There is some pandering taking place. The plankton that are basically a collection of samples from Mario Bros. are a one-trick pony wearing a garish red cap and vomiting liquid cotton candy all over your Legend of Zelda bedsheets. In other words, it’s horribly boring and a little repugnant after you get over the novelty of it all. The 4-track recording plankton is also more of a grudging acknowledgement of the DS’s microphone than a good foundation for musical creation. In either of these cases, you’d be much better off getting an actual 4-track or making actual chiptunes than playing around with something that can’t give you the complete functionality of what it’s emulating without offering you anything special on its own.
This is not to say that there’s anything especially profound about Electroplankton. It’s an honest little piece of code that lets you make fun noises through tactile interactions. It succeeds at what it does because it was made by somebody who has a good idea of what sounds good and how people might want to generate sounds, not to mention an interface and graphical style that’s charming without being twee. It’s a success that’s blemished by the wondering and waffling over whether it’s a game or not. This is similar to the too-common message-board argument of whether games are “art” or what “art” is. Ultimately, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and it was with that in mind that a precedent had to be set, that a flag had to be stuck in the ground..
☆☆☆☆
“IS THE MOST WORTHWHILE PIECE OF SOFTWARE THAT YOU COULD PUT IN YOUR DS.”
Electroplankton is definitely my favorite piece of software for the DS, probably one of the best portable pieces of software I own and one of the most pleasing pieces of electronic entertainment that I’ve devoted my time towards. It’s a ballsy experiment that wants to be loved, a joyful piece of work that’s happy without making you want to throw up in your mouth (Mario (since the N64), I’m looking at you). Yet, I’m giving it zero stars (out of four). I’m doing this because Electroplankton isn’t a game. And heck, this is a site for game reviews.
Now, this is a little unfair. After all, I’m not going to follow this up with successive zero-star reviews of kanji dicitionaries or any of the other assorted titles for the DS that are clearly not games. That would be a pretty jerky move and would be like if we suddenly started giving zero-star reviews to motorcycles because hey, those aren’t games either. No, Electroplankton is a pretty unique case, in that while it’s not a game, it’s not clearly something else, since generally those other DS titles have a purpose, like trying to teach you Japanese characters or simulating a guitar. Electroplankton, in comparison, is enough like a game to confuse people. After all, there aren’t any explicit goals, which both eliminates it from being a purposeful piece of software like a kanji dictionary and hilariously enough, also from what we typically think of as a game.
Electroplankton‘s modules are based on the theory of “found music” or musique concrète, which basically boils down to “music can be what you find, rather than what you create”. These modules are set up so that a series of small interactions on the part of the user act as triggers for generating musical sequences. The interactions are simple enough that the user can figure out how to manipulate each module in a short period of time and vague enough that the user is never really composing in the traditional sense. They’re hitting things to see what happens and most of the time, you’ll eventually get something you like. The key to the success of Electroplankton in this area is that the modules are mostly very well-designed, allowing the user to generate a wide variety of pleasing tones without sounding like a 5-year-old smashing their hands on a piano.
A major part of musique concrète is the concept of play, which is why Electroplankton is such a confusing piece of software. The best way to put it seems to be that you don’t play Electroplankton, you play with it. The semantic assumption of the latter is that the act of playing is teleological, or to be less of a dick about it, that there’s an end to the means. The way that we understand how to play a game is to progress. It’s this lack of progression that separates Electroplankton from something like SimCity. Electroplankton is a pure sandbox in the sense that the entirety of the experience is to create something temporary, an aural equivalent of the Zen Sand Tray that’s supposed to help executives relax their balls. These things are commonly referred to as ‘toys’ and that’s a good enough term for what Electroplankton does, with the caveat that the usual reaction to ‘toy’ is to assume a lack of significance, which is indicative of a disturbing lack of imagination.
When Electroplankton was shown to a dementedly grinning E3 audience, it was presented by a DJ with a full set of rack-mounted equipment and accompanied on the big screen with quick cuts of gnarly graphics and effects, all while Reggie Fils-Aime gyrated and gurned on-stage. This was, of course, viciously &^#$#ed. If you’re going to make techno music, get a sampler and a synthesizer. Hell, the way things are going now, you’d probably just need the sampler. Using Electroplankton as part of your compositions would be a gimmick, a chiptune-esque trope that says “the most important thing about my music is not my music”. While the actual presentation was astonishingly dumb, I can’t really blame Nintendo for taking the easy way out. Wheeling out somebody on a bed who’s using a nice set of headphones, who just noodles around for 10 minutes before finding something that they find particularly pleasing and then maybe stretches their head back with their eyes closed, while this is nice, while this is a great example of how Electroplankton is the most worthwhile piece of software that you could put in your DS, this is not exactly something that’s going to set Reggie’s loins on fire. Better have Shiggy come out with a sword and shield then.
There is some pandering taking place. The plankton that are basically a collection of samples from Mario Bros. are a one-trick pony wearing a garish red cap and vomiting liquid cotton candy all over your Legend of Zelda bedsheets. In other words, it’s horribly boring and a little repugnant after you get over the novelty of it all. The 4-track recording plankton is also more of a grudging acknowledgement of the DS’s microphone than a good foundation for musical creation. In either of these cases, you’d be much better off getting an actual 4-track or making actual chiptunes than playing around with something that can’t give you the complete functionality of what it’s emulating without offering you anything special on its own.
This is not to say that there’s anything especially profound about Electroplankton. It’s an honest little piece of code that lets you make fun noises through tactile interactions. It succeeds at what it does because it was made by somebody who has a good idea of what sounds good and how people might want to generate sounds, not to mention an interface and graphical style that’s charming without being twee. It’s a success that’s blemished by the wondering and waffling over whether it’s a game or not. This is similar to the too-common message-board argument of whether games are “art” or what “art” is. Ultimately, it’s a waste of everybody’s time and it was with that in mind that a precedent had to be set, that a flag had to be stuck in the ground..
text by Brendan Lee
★⋆☆☆
"BORING."
Most people are in complete agreement that shooters are second only to Those Rhythm Games in terms of sheer Pavlovian click-here-for-joy vacuity. If you’re the type of diehard that gets off on solitary pattern memorization – – and you’re, you know, not prone to epilepsy – – they’re pretty much the ultimate that this life has to offer you.
At least until they begin selling pre-chewed Pop Tarts.
It’s a format that’s rapidly wilting, shooters. People have, by and large, figured out the punchline; only the occasional efforts by a rambunctious, tow-headed doujin community and a handful of rickety old-skoolers have been able to slap enough maids and squirrel-voiced seiyuu into shooters to satisfy their few remaining devotees. Sadly, gamers don’t know how to move on, as a rule. They collectively realize that if you stare at a corpse long and hard enough, eventually some small movement will arise – – that it’s just the worms come to gnaw at the gristle is the sort of observation that only the pickiest of spoilsports would bother coughing into their hands.
The same innate sense of lonely isolation that has preserved the hardcore shooter fanbase is the enemy, in this age of multiplayer . . . and Senko no Ronde (flatly retitled WarTech for the Xbox 360) has the right idea. It is, in fact, a valiant effort to create a cooperative arcade culture from a fundamentally solitary gaming format. In this case, it means a mash-up: a dash of classic shooter dynamics, a jigger of close-quarters punch-up, and a large dollop swiped directly from Virtual On. The mix at least looks utterly compelling – – even if you don’t entirely buy into its Xenosaga-cum-Zegapain PastelBot regime. Any bit of the game you happen to see in motion has you sitting and playing for at least one round . . . it is its own attract mode, and it clearly knows it.
And then you play. And . . . well, it’s just kind of syrup-slow and boring, most of the time. Honestly, if they were expecting to build the same kind of army of nicotine-thumbed fighting fans that has allowed ARC to keep swapping out Guilty Gear color palettes, they should have actually given them something to keep their reflexes from going numb. The Rounders (PastelBots) move like capsule toys through delicious honey, and the Boss Mode combat has one of the worst my-turn-your-turn dynamics since Killer Instinct. The controls are intuitive enough for those with a little patience, but the way the game transitions from one battle mode to another is jarring and annoying enough to create the illusion that they aren’t. When you’re transitioning from the standard space battlefield to close-quarters combat, the camera zooms in to SHOW YOU ALL THE ACTION, and you’re immediately disoriented. When one of the PastelBots (Rounders) switches to Boss Mode, you get a little flashcard of slapdash anime clip-art and a chirpy voice to accompany the entire screen changing on you. If you’ve grown to accept random battles in RPGs and selecting FIGHT from text boxes, you’ll probably be able to shift gears along with Senko no Ronde as it shows you how many games it can try to be, but . . . I dunno, I been working on this thing where I’m less spastic lately.
And another thing: that Boss Mode. It’s . . . well, it’s damn creaky. Once the screen’s done its Big Woosh changing thing and your eyes have uncrossed, you (or your opponent) get the opportunity to be really Big and shoot a million jillion Glow Orbs all around – – just like the bosses in all those beloved shooters. It’s pointless and unnerving, especially with the Rounders inability to dodge with any speed or sensitivity . . . and it’s kind of a psychological kick in the balls for anyone who ever spent their time memorizing bullet patterns on more classically-conceptualized shooting titles. The game kind of realizes this, so don’t expect to spend much time Bossing it around – – it’s just a little Nostalgia Snack, and over before it begins. What a waste: it’s development time that could have been spent on making the normal combat more interesting and responsive.
These kinds of format mash-ups can work, on occasion . . . if you look at something like, say, Data East’s The Great Ragtimeshow, you’ll find a game that successfully blended Metal Slug‘s sense of humor and vehicular variety, the air combat of classic shooters, and an amazing feel for the era’s best platforming into a game that’s a visual feast and an utter joy (and hey, this was 1992). It takes a great deal of vision to make this kind of thing work, though, and it’s painfully obvious when a developer is just trying to ham-fist another format on top of another to help prop up weak gameplay.
Senko no Ronde, for all of the hype and keyfroth, is an also-ran: too wrapped up in making its Game Salad to remember that we’d ordered a hamburger. There may be something out there to defibrillate the paunchy mess of moe-shooters and frame-count twitch-fighters that are littering Japan’s arcades (and increasingly your Xbox 360), but this certainly ain’t it.
★⋆☆☆
"BORING."
Most people are in complete agreement that shooters are second only to Those Rhythm Games in terms of sheer Pavlovian click-here-for-joy vacuity. If you’re the type of diehard that gets off on solitary pattern memorization – – and you’re, you know, not prone to epilepsy – – they’re pretty much the ultimate that this life has to offer you.
At least until they begin selling pre-chewed Pop Tarts.
It’s a format that’s rapidly wilting, shooters. People have, by and large, figured out the punchline; only the occasional efforts by a rambunctious, tow-headed doujin community and a handful of rickety old-skoolers have been able to slap enough maids and squirrel-voiced seiyuu into shooters to satisfy their few remaining devotees. Sadly, gamers don’t know how to move on, as a rule. They collectively realize that if you stare at a corpse long and hard enough, eventually some small movement will arise – – that it’s just the worms come to gnaw at the gristle is the sort of observation that only the pickiest of spoilsports would bother coughing into their hands.
The same innate sense of lonely isolation that has preserved the hardcore shooter fanbase is the enemy, in this age of multiplayer . . . and Senko no Ronde (flatly retitled WarTech for the Xbox 360) has the right idea. It is, in fact, a valiant effort to create a cooperative arcade culture from a fundamentally solitary gaming format. In this case, it means a mash-up: a dash of classic shooter dynamics, a jigger of close-quarters punch-up, and a large dollop swiped directly from Virtual On. The mix at least looks utterly compelling – – even if you don’t entirely buy into its Xenosaga-cum-Zegapain PastelBot regime. Any bit of the game you happen to see in motion has you sitting and playing for at least one round . . . it is its own attract mode, and it clearly knows it.
And then you play. And . . . well, it’s just kind of syrup-slow and boring, most of the time. Honestly, if they were expecting to build the same kind of army of nicotine-thumbed fighting fans that has allowed ARC to keep swapping out Guilty Gear color palettes, they should have actually given them something to keep their reflexes from going numb. The Rounders (PastelBots) move like capsule toys through delicious honey, and the Boss Mode combat has one of the worst my-turn-your-turn dynamics since Killer Instinct. The controls are intuitive enough for those with a little patience, but the way the game transitions from one battle mode to another is jarring and annoying enough to create the illusion that they aren’t. When you’re transitioning from the standard space battlefield to close-quarters combat, the camera zooms in to SHOW YOU ALL THE ACTION, and you’re immediately disoriented. When one of the PastelBots (Rounders) switches to Boss Mode, you get a little flashcard of slapdash anime clip-art and a chirpy voice to accompany the entire screen changing on you. If you’ve grown to accept random battles in RPGs and selecting FIGHT from text boxes, you’ll probably be able to shift gears along with Senko no Ronde as it shows you how many games it can try to be, but . . . I dunno, I been working on this thing where I’m less spastic lately.
And another thing: that Boss Mode. It’s . . . well, it’s damn creaky. Once the screen’s done its Big Woosh changing thing and your eyes have uncrossed, you (or your opponent) get the opportunity to be really Big and shoot a million jillion Glow Orbs all around – – just like the bosses in all those beloved shooters. It’s pointless and unnerving, especially with the Rounders inability to dodge with any speed or sensitivity . . . and it’s kind of a psychological kick in the balls for anyone who ever spent their time memorizing bullet patterns on more classically-conceptualized shooting titles. The game kind of realizes this, so don’t expect to spend much time Bossing it around – – it’s just a little Nostalgia Snack, and over before it begins. What a waste: it’s development time that could have been spent on making the normal combat more interesting and responsive.
These kinds of format mash-ups can work, on occasion . . . if you look at something like, say, Data East’s The Great Ragtimeshow, you’ll find a game that successfully blended Metal Slug‘s sense of humor and vehicular variety, the air combat of classic shooters, and an amazing feel for the era’s best platforming into a game that’s a visual feast and an utter joy (and hey, this was 1992). It takes a great deal of vision to make this kind of thing work, though, and it’s painfully obvious when a developer is just trying to ham-fist another format on top of another to help prop up weak gameplay.
Senko no Ronde, for all of the hype and keyfroth, is an also-ran: too wrapped up in making its Game Salad to remember that we’d ordered a hamburger. There may be something out there to defibrillate the paunchy mess of moe-shooters and frame-count twitch-fighters that are littering Japan’s arcades (and increasingly your Xbox 360), but this certainly ain’t it.